The demands for high performance electronic products with higher performing semiconductor devices have increased concerns over reliability of semiconductor devices or components. Modern electronics including consumer and commercial products such as cellular phones, game consoles, computer systems, and video displays, require increasing integrated circuit die content with ever-increasing performance. Returns are one of the most undesirable and costly issues for product vendors especially vendors of high performance technology products. If products turn out to be recalled, these vendors can suffer significant financial damage.
In the semiconductor world, reliability can mean the ability not to be disqualified within the duration of use. If the chip has poor reliability, it will deteriorate its power, speed, or even stop working within the duration of use. In general, integrated circuits distributed on the side of higher power and/or slower speed have a higher possibility of being unreliable or defective after coming onto the market or product introduction. Especially those integrated circuits with characteristics near or on the edge of the distribution have the highest risk of becoming unreliable within the duration of use.
Electronic products may include many components or devices from a potentially wide variety of suppliers. These components can vary in performance including power and speed even from a single supplier. Manufacturing variations can be a primary contributor to these variations causing a significant distribution or variance in performance for a given component. These components can vary significantly across a large production quantity of a single electronic product. In the event of a reliability issue, a vendor might be required to recall affected products. The affected products may actually be related to only specific components with identifiable characteristics.
Products are typically identified by the vendor providing the consumer or commercial system based on the vendor's manufacturing criteria. The individual components within the product are generally assumed to be within specification and thereby associated with the system vendor's product identification. Unfortunately, the individual components can vary based on the component vendor's manufacturing processes and criteria. In the event that defective product is caused at least in part by the component vendor's characteristics, the system vendor can only identify large sequences or all of the product having the component vendor's parts. Large quantities of potentially affected product are extremely costly and damaging to a vendor's reputation.
While it is most desirable to provide non-defective products, it is inevitable that some products will not meet specifications. Products increasingly include internal components having distributions or variances from a supplier. The distribution or variance of the internal component is particularly difficult to identify when assembled in the consumer or commercial product. It is therefore important to consider minimizing product liability risks such as integrated circuit deterioration, increasing power consumption, degradation in speed, or failure within the duration of use with internal components having individual characteristics.
Thus, a need still remains for a product identification system to improve product identification including component characteristics. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to save costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures, adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.